tomf@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Tom Fredericks) (02/14/89)
Anyone know anything about a tek 4027? Ie: what are the drawbacks and such? I have an opportunity to get one and was wondering if it would be worth it, rather than just a standard vt100 type terminal. Thanks, Tom... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enter the point where reality and illusion merge to become one... tomf@boulder.Colorado.EDU -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ron@ron.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (02/16/89)
The 4027 has good things and bad things. The good thing is it's a fairly resonable color graphics terminal. It has a nice textual command set. It also does 4014 emulation (natch). As a matter of fact I made the background color dark green one day and the "ink" color bright green to fully exploit the 4014 emulation. The keyboard is also completely reprogrammable. I then reprogrammed the clear (erase) key to turn the screen bright green for a second before clearing the screen when you pushed it. The Tek salesman nearly lost his lunch. The bad thing is that it is got the most braindammaged setup for interaction. The way the thing works is that when you type the command character on the keyboard (whether or not it's being echoed) the thing intercepts the rest of you keyboard input and executes it locally. This is handy and not too bad if you make the command character something obscure. Commands are terminated with a carriage return (you can gang multiple commands up by serparating them with more command characters). The problem is that when a command character comes from the host, indicating that the rest of the command is about to follow, the thing scans both the keyboard, and the host, rather than just the one that sent the command character. Therefore if you are typing things on the keyboard while the computer is sending commands (like trying to cursor address) your letters will be treated as part of the commands. This usually causes an error and then the rest of the command gets dumped on the screen because you are nologner in command mode. There is no known way to fix this. Another fun thing is to set your command character to 13 (carriage return) with the !com 13 command. Let me know if you do this, the way to undo it is not at all obvious. -Ron